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For over 150 years squatters — artists, sailors who had jumped ship, bohemians and people unable or unwilling to pay rent — have made improvised homes for themselves along the shores of the Fraser River, Vancouver Harbour and Burrard Inlet.

Many were simply looking for a place to live, but others, including novelist Malcolm Lowry, poets Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay, and Al Purdy and whale expert and Greenpeace founder Paul Spong used their homes as sites for important creative work.

More recently photographer Stan Douglas and visual artist Ken Lum have created works based on the homes of artists on the Burrard Inlet foreshore.

Now, the last surviving example of the unofficial residences on Burrard Inlet — a cabin near Cates Park on the North Shore that has served artistic collaborators Al Neil and Carole Itter variously as a residence and an artist’s workshop for decades — is under threat. Neil and Itter still use and maintain the one-room cabin, which has no plumbing and appears to be in sound condition.

The cabin must be removed from the beach where it has stood for nearly 80 years by the end of January to allow the foreshore toxic contamination to be remediated., according to Port Metro Vancouver, which controls the harbour and its foreshore,

Since an eviction notice was served in late 2014, a small group of Lower Mainland artists and supporters, including Grunt Gallery’s Glenn Alteen and artist Esther Rausenberg have been trying to find a way to move and preserve the cabin, where some of the most cutting edge and original art work of the past decades was created.

Philanthropist and Polygon Homes owner Michael Audain has said his company is willing to “help defray the cost of” moving the weathered blue structure to a temporary location until it can be preserved and used as an ongoing resource for local artists and communities.

Polygon Homes is building a development on land adjacent to where the Neil/Itter cabin stands.

“This is important art history,” said Audain. “Doing this is just part of our responsibility as good corporate citizens.”

Audain has used his eponymous foundation and Polygon to channel millions of dollars into art projects in B.C., most recently a $4m donation to Presentation House Gallery in November. The $30m Audain Museum in Whistler is scheduled to open before the end of 2015, and will house the founder’s huge collection of B.C. and aboriginal art.

Al Neil, a Vancouver native and WWII veteran, first moved into the cabin, built in the mid-1930s by a Scandinavian worker who moved it on to the beach when he got work at neighbouring shipbuilder McKenzie Barge & Derrick Co., in 1966.

By then the 42-year-old Neil was already established as a key figure in B.C.’s jazz world as a “free jazz” pianist and had begun other careers as a writer and visual artist. He was particularly known for his work in collage and assemblage.

In 2008, Neil was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2014, he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Mayor’s Arts Awards in Vancouver. He now lives in Vancouver.

Neil was not, strictly speaking, a squatter — he served as an informal beach watchman for the McKenzie Barge property adjacent to the cabin.

Neil’s presence was viewed as at least one degree more legitimate than that of most of the other foreshore residents. On at least one occasion in the late 1970s, a phone call from the McKenzie office was enough to call off an earlier official attempt to evict him.

Itter, 76, has collaborated with Neil extensively and shared the use of the cabin since 1979. Itter is a sculptor, art instructor, filmmaker, oral historian, and writer who has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.

A rich archive of both artists’ work, plus essays and films about them have been collected at website Vancouver Art in the Sixties at vancouverartinthesixties.com.

Glenn Alteen, program director of Grunt Gallery, played a key role in creating the cyber archive, and is among those now trying to find a way to preserve the Neil-Itter cabin.

“Preserving this cabin would create a real opportunity for people to find out about an important and fascinating history,” Alteen said.

Itter, who also lives in Vancouver, said she liked the idea of the cabin being preserved.

“One of the hugely comforting things about the large assemblages Al and I collaborated on near the cabin was that they weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t part of the art racket.”

For decades Itter and Neil have used the cabin as a focal point for creating art that wasn’t part of the commercial art world, but is an important element in the history of art in Canada.

Nancy Kirkpatrick, director of the North Vancouver Museum and archives, agrees that it is important to preserve the cabin.

“It is a highly symbolic building because it tangibly connects us to a now-vanished way of life when people could live ‘off-the-grid’ and on the waterfront within the bounds of a rapidly urbanizing metropolitan area where private access to the waterfront is now restricted to the wealthy and the well-connected,” Kirkpatrick said in a report she prepared in fall 2014.

District of North Vancouver Chief Administrative Officer David Stuart said district staff took a look at the cabin and advised that it might not have the structural integrity to allow it to be hoisted and moved.

Stuart said the cost of bringing the building up to code if it were to be used by the public would be “in the range of $60,000.”

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Artists fight to preserve historic, 80-year-old North Vancouver cabin

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